This invention relates to a method and system for inputting names into a computer using automatic speech recognition technology. While the field of speech recognition is full of prior art, the inventor is not aware of any art that [that] teaches the invention disclosed here. A little background is in order to explain how the invention fills a gap.
It is obvious that talking to a computer would be quite a convenient method of input in many situations. But current speech recognizers are not reliable enough to do accurate inputting of data. Currently, the reliability of the best speaker independent recognizers is around 90% at best, a rate that falls short of being practical for most uses.
Another problem, particularly regarding names, is that even the most powerful recognizers today can only recognize around 50,000 words. This number may seem like a lot, but the universe of names far exceeds 50,000, which means that a recognizable name must be part of a severely restricted list. In many applications it is impractical to severely restrict the list of possible names.
A solution would seem to be spelling so that the names themselves would not actually be recognized, just the letters in the names. The problem here is that recognizers have trouble with letters. (Letters are hard to distinguish even for humans.) Even if a recognizer is 90% accurate, it would still have [over a 50%] approximately a 47% chance of making a mistake with just 6 letters spelled. It is easy to see then why recognizers have not been used to automate of such tasks as directory assistance, where callers would spell names into a computer.
One way around this problem is to make the recognizer interactive. Thus when a speaker says, for example, the letter "A", the recognizer would output its best guess. The recognizer might return an audio message, "Did you say `K`?" The speaker would reply, "NO," and the recognizer would then output its next best guess, perhaps "J" or perhaps "A". Eventually, the recognizer would get the letter right.
The problem here is that the method is too slow for spelling even fairly short names. The user friendliness of automatic speech recognition is lost. Therefore, conventional wisdom holds that spelling will have limited use. Indeed, despite being on the market for a several years, sales of alpha recognizers in the United States have been poor.
However, a new method and system, disclosed here, makes it possible to overcome the inherent limitations of alpha recognizers in many applications, especially those involving names.